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"Via this intermediate Link" how do I stop the madness?

-1- I have an old site which had a manual spam action placed against it several years ago, this is the corporate site and unfortunately has its name placed on all business cards etc, therefore I am unable to get rid of this site entirely..

-2- I created a brand new site with a new domain name for which white hat SEO marketing has been done and very little of it... everything was doing well up until last week when I dropped from bottom of page one to top of page 11 for my keyword in question.

-3- I changed the old sites ( the one with the manual spam action ) to mimic the look of the FIRST PAGE of the new domain I am using, and I have the main menu items on this first page linked to the appropriate sections within the new domain site, i.e About US etc. On this page I'm the following:

and am linking as such:<li><ahref="http://www.mynewsite.com/about/" class="" rel="nofollow">ABOUT US</a></li>using this approach I was hoping that I was doing the correct and not passing along any link juice good or bad however when I view the "Webmaster Tools->Links to your site" I find 1000+ links from my old site and then when I click on it I see all the spammy links that my old site got banned for pointing to my old site and accompanied by a header "Via this imtermediate Link>myoldSite.com".

Can someone please sehd some light on what I should e doing or if even these link are effecting my new site, something is telling me there are but how do I resolve this issue..

27 Responses

History is showing us that canonical tags are very powerful, and do pass pagerank. Canonical tags and 301 redirects pass roughly the same authority, so even if your physical links are nofollow, those canonical tags are still being interpreted by bots as a link-like entity.

So, by cananocalizing your old domain to your new one, you effectively moved all those links to your new domain, just like they would have with a 301.

if that's the case then what should I do as I don't want those spammy links to effect me, bringing down my new sites SEO position? do I just remove the canoncal and let the main page be seen as a duplicate content to the main page of my new site or slightly change the content of the old site that is linking to the newsite using "nofollow"

in addition should I be submitting a exclusion list of the spammy urls?

If you're trying to transfer the good SEO juice, but leave the manual action on the old site, that might not be possible. Google has been cracking down on that, and if you try to move over the good stuff, the bad will follow.

It looks like you have two options:

1) You can 301 the old site, disavow all the bad links, and hope for the best. This way you aren't completely starting from scratch, but the amount of ranks you'll recover won't be clear until a few weeks after you do complete this strategy. Different sites have different results doing this. It depends on the penalty, how well you clean up the links, etc.

2) Start from scratch. New content, new domain, new everything, so there's no relation to the penalized site. This might be what you want to do if the manual action is severe. It'll take a bit more analysis than seeing one keyword drop to know the extent of the penalty you're experiencing.

I don't care about transferring any of link juice over to the new site, whether good or bad, I just can't create yet another site using another newdomain name. I need to stay with the newsitedomain name that I am currently using. what would you recommend:

-1- removing the canonical name and also doing a disavow of the bad links from the old site?

-2- leave the canonical name and just do the disavow on the old site domain name

If your content is the same on the new site as the old then believe it or not, you don't even need a canonical tag for Google to recognize that this is the same site and apply your old links to your new site.

Here's more info on this: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-site-move-18163.html

There are two possible ways around this that I can see. The first would be to remove your new site from the web and then completely noindex your old site (blocking by robots.txt won't do it - I've tried.) You can then use the url removal tool to remove the old site completely from the index. It's important that the noindex tags are in place otherwise they may pop up again at some point. Once the old site is completely removed then you can add the new site. I've done this with another site and the "via this intermediate" links have not come back.

If you have pages on your old site that have good links and you want to 301 them to the new site you could keep them live, noindex the page and then do a redirect that goes through an intermediate page that's blocked by robots.txt. BUT, know that this passes all link juice to the page. If there are bad links then there's nothing you can do to just pass the good juice along. I haven't done this and it's complicated. There's more information on that here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/can-you-recover-from-penguin-by-301-redirecting-your-homepage/.

Ideally the best way to ensure that you are not causing Google to see a canonical is to create brand new pages with new content.

Thank you for the detailed response.. The new site is completely different in all aspects then the old site. I have also just replaced the old site with ONE page and all pages from the old site being redirected to that ONE Page on the old site.

The oldsite's main page contains several buttons at the top, i.e. About us, Gallery etc, each one of these buttons is linked to the appropriate subdirectory of the new site: using a nofollow,

Can you recommend the best approach , I'm not even sure if this is the reason for the SEO drop, but if it isn't I'm sure it will be shortly so I figured I would address it..

I made a change on the new site several weeks back via iis where I just redirected all mynewsite.com traffic to www.mynewsite.com

I also just logged into GWT->Search Traffic->Manual Actions and am presented with the message "No manual webspam actions found." on both sites, which I find strange on the old site because back in 2012 when I contacted google they told me a manual penality had been invoked due to unnatural link patterns. Does this Manual Actions work?

If you've removed the canonical tag AND there are no duplicate pages on the new site from the old site then I'd think that the via this intermediate link messages should go within 2-3 weeks.

It sounds like a complicated situation though so I don't think we can give you a complete answer without having a deeper look at your site which is something that probably goes beyond the scope of a forum question.

thank you for the reply, I am probably not explaining my situation correctly..

I have one following:

-1- two completed different sites, oldsite.com, newsite..com-2- I don't care about losing any of the link juice from the oldsite.com, I just don't want to risk any of the bad links from the oldsite.com transferring over to the newsite.com-3- I have created a duplicate landing page for the oldsite.com which looks like the newsite.com landing page, and buttons that get clicked on the oldsite.com landing page point to the appropriate page within the newsite.com. I am using nofollow links. and I also have canonical set between the oldsite.com and newsite.com landing page.-4- GWT is showing me lots of "via intermediate site: spammy links from oldsite.com on the newsites GWT.

What can I do to reverse this? should I just start a massive disavow process from oldsite.com links or is there a way for me to better construct the transition from the user landing on oldsite.com and clicking on a navigation button which takes them to newsite.com

Seriously why complicate things? The problem was the old site and you know it thats the very reason why you created a new site. Just like MarieHaynes said "It sounds like a complicated situation though so I don't think we can give you a complete answer without having a deeper look at your site" maybe wait for few weeks and let google find your site again and if you have corrected your site, google will eventually correct its data too.

I think this is the right time to use "nofollow, noindex" what i will do is change the content of the page where your visitors visits the most and want to redirect to the new one. Change it contents and warn visitors that you will be redirected to a new site and then do a meta refresh (do not use domain forwarding as some hosting converts it to 301, do not use canonical as well) meta refresh it for 5 seconds or more enough for your users to read the content just not shorter than 5 seconds (just to be safe) do not place a link on the content (just to be safe again) just remember to use "nofollow, noindex" on all the pages of your old site and disallow on your robots.txt :)

I think that the main problem here is that no one knows for sure what kind of things can pass on a link related penalty. So, from what I know of your situation, here's what I'd say:

-Change your home page content on the new page so that it is significantly different from the old page. The reason for this is that Google seems to be able to recognize that the links that used to point to that exact content should now be pointing at the new page. If the new page changes then the "via this intermediate link" should really go.

-Remove any canonical tags that point from the old site to the new

-Most likely having a nofollowed link saying "we've moved" and pointing at the new site would be safe. I can't say that 100% for sure though.

-I actually would not block the old site by robots.txt UNTIL you have noindexed the page and have seen that it is no longer in the Google results. So, add <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to the page and then use the url removal tool found in Webmaster Tools to ask Google to completely remove that page from the index and the cache. (You'll get a choice of just the index or index+cache - Choose the latter.) That should result in the page leaving the index within 24 hours. You'll know if it is in the index if you do a site:yoursite.com search and see "no results". Once that has happened, then you can add the robots.txt directive to disallow the home page (or really, all of the site).

The reason why you want to do it in this order is that if you add the robots.txt block right now then Google won't be able to recrawl the page to recognize that you've changed the canonical and the noindex status.

I did this for one other site and the "via this intermediate" link notices disappeared in about 2 weeks.

It appears as if the oldsite is no longer in google's index and that the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> has done wonders as far as that is concerned. However it now also appears as if my newsites main page is also no longer in googles index.. my newsites subpages are still in the index but its main page is no longer. I'm hoping that this might just be a temporary problem in googles index while they are doing a refresh or something... , I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Any suggestions should I just wait it out and see if it comes back or is there something I should manually be doing to get my newsites main page back in googles index.

-1- Yes it appears as if both sites main pages have disappeared from the google index, if I do a site:mynewsite the main page is nowhere to be found, however I'm able to see the other pages from the newsite there.

-2- I have checked and actually my newsite doesn't even contain a robots.txt and I have also verified the contents of my newsite main page tomain sure that it doesn't contain a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

-3- Hi, no url removal of either site, I did however disavow some links a couple of weeks back, but I have once again looked through my disavow list that I uploaded and made sure that I hadn't disavowed anything from either of the main sites, which woun;t have but just wanted to double check.

This is really odd. I can't see any real reason for Google to noindex your current site.

I wouldn't remove the tag from the old site. It doesn't make sense that this would affect your new site.

Would you be interested in sharing your url with me? This case really interests me and I'd love to help you sort it out. Feel free to contact me via my Moz profile. I'm currently at MozCon right now, so I might not be able to reply right away but I'd like to sort this out as it is an odd case.

thank you so much for offering to look at the site, I tried to send you a private message via moz, and it doesn't work, it can't find you even thought I'm on your profile page and click on "Private Message this User".

Thank you, you are correct, and thank you for the response, for which I have responded back, not sure if you have received it..

Anyway its really strange, within a week after I added the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to the oldsite then the new sites main page also disappeared... I would really like to get this new sites main page back in the google index...

I have just noticed something else interesting.. within my GWT sitemap section (new Site ) it shows 9 URLs being submitted yet only 8 URL being indexed, the one missing from the indexing is my homepage. I have updated the last modified date of the sitemap as they were in the past and have resubmitted the index, I have also resubmitted the one main page itself using the "Fetch as Google" -> Submit to Index Option.

I have also changed the contents of the main page on my newsite so thats its now less of a duplicate then that of the oldsite's new mainpage.

BTW its to bad that when Submitted pages to the index are not indexed via the sitemap that google doesn't give you the reason. According to google there are no errors in my sitemap..

Sorry I haven't been able to respond again by email. I'm at Mozcon right now and typing from the airport. It's been a crazy, busy, fun week. :) I'll respond here though rather than by email as it may help others.

I am fairly certain that the problem here is all because your new site has the exact same content on the homepage as the old site does. As the old page was the one that Google first saw with that content, the new page is automatically being canonicalized to the old (even though you have the correct canonical on the new.) What I think is happening is that when you noindexed the old page, because of the invisible canonical, the new page got noindexed as well.

I remember Matt Cutts or John Mueller saying something before about how you should not point a rel canonical at a noindexed page because it can confuse Google. You didn't point the canonical there, but Google has probably assigned it because it was a duplication of the old page.

If this is true, then here are the possible solutions that I can think of:

-Create new content on the new page (which you have already done.) I would then use fetch as googlebot to get google to refetch that page. If I'm right, it should be back in the index quickly.

-If that doesn't work, consider removing the noindex from the old page until you see the new page pop back in the index. You'll likely also have to remove any robots.txt block of the old page so that Google can see that you want it indexed again. Then, once you see the new page is back in the index, and that the new content on your new page is in the cache, you can go back and reapply the noindex on the old page.

Hopefully that's not too confusing.

I want to hold off for now on answering your question about how to redirect users from the old site to the new without passing along a penalty. The reason is that no one knows for sure which methods work safely to do this and be guaranteed that you're not passing along link juice from unnatural links. Does link equity travel through a meta refresh? I'm guessing no, but I can't say for sure. I want to say that you can 301 the old page to an intermediary page that is blocked by robots.txt and then redirect it back to the new page, but I have to do some more tests before I am comfortable saying this with certainty. There are other solutions that may work as well.

I currently have some tests going on that will help me determine which method is safe for redirecting without passing on a penalty and I'll post something to my site once I've got the tests complete enough.

Perhaps someone with more experience in doing this type of thing will see your question and respond too...I'm open to suggestions!

-1- changing the content ( of the OLDSites main page ), which was almost an exact copy of the newsites main page and -2- also removing the noindex on the oldsites main page and then -3- doing the good fetch, submit ( on both OldSite and New Site ) and then -4- resubmitting my NewSite sitemap.

Viola just checked and both sites main pages are now back in the google index. what I have noticed so is this.. The OldSite Url which now currently only has a main page to is is ranking #6 for my main kw, and the NewSites main page even thought its in the index doing a site: isn't ranking at the moment..

Ideally I would like to just do a permanent redirect on the OldSite to the NewSite, but as said before I had never done that because of a manual link penality which was placed against the OldSites main page, the penailtiy has since been removed and I have also tried to clean up and spammy links using disavow. Do you think it is safe to do a redirect or should I wait a bit...

I guess it was like you had said google had automatically thought that my new sites main page was actually a redirect from my old sites page because as the two pages were 99% the same., and as such ranked my newsite well using I think some push from my oldsite. The fact that this is no longer occuring and my oldsite is ranking well makes me think that it might be safe to manually do the redirect as we thought google was doing for us..

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I should have some information on my tests on ways to safely redirect penalized sites. I'm reluctant to give advice until then. On one hand, you could say that because your penalty is removed you could just go ahead and institute a 301 redirect now. However, I would not recommend this. The reason for that is that even though you've had a manual penalty removed, there is still a possibility that there are links out there that could harm your sites in the eyes of Penguin. I would not want to redirect any of the bad links to the new site.

When I do have my tests done I'll post here. In the meantime, if others have ideas, it would be awesome to hear of their experiences.

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